“You seemed to go off into your own world there, kiddo,” her father chirped, pulling in.
But Mary was not alone; she knew that now. She was not, and would never be, alone.
The memory of what she’d felt in the car did not fade, and Mary waited for this feeling to visit her again. This did not take place until many years later, a year that began in the town of Twig.
She was twenty-two; on the hill above the town stood the college where Mary had graduated in June. She’d had friends and boyfriends, sung in the choir, failed one course (economics: a mistake), and passed the rest with A’s and B’s. At graduation the bishop of Oslo had delivered the keynote address, speaking through an interpreter before boarding a helicopter that lifted him into a June sky of flawless blue. His advice was sensible—walk modestly, cherish your families, obey the laws of man and God—but as his helicopter sailed away, washing the graduates’ upturned faces with the beating air of its blades, Mary understood, with a jolt, that she’d made a terrible mistake. How would she do any of this? While her friends had interviewed for jobs and filled out their applications to graduate school, Mary had spent the winter of her senior year writing a long paper on Baudelaire and taking walks through the snowy sanctuary of trees and prairie grasses behind the campus. She had majored in French, because it was easy and beautiful, but it had prepared her for nothing, and now, behind the mask of her sunglasses, her robe still fluttering from the wind of the helicopter, she felt her face warm with the shame of this discovery. After the ceremony she drove north with friends to a rented cabin on an icy lake where they spent a week drinking beer and waterskiing, but she no longer felt herself to be a part of them; when the week was over, and these same friends drove off to Chicago or Minneapolis or even Los Angeles to begin their lives, Mary returned to the town of Twig.
The bar where she worked was called the Norway, and she shared an apartment over a shoe store with two boys, Curtis and Russell. They had been roommates at the college, where they’d graduated a year before. They did not seem to like one another very much, though Mary had come to understand this was common with men who lived together and were also friends. Curtis sometimes tended bar at the Norway and spent his afternoons before a small easel in the corner of the apartment, smoking and painting. He was small, with dark hair, pale skin, and a sharp chin, and his paintings, Mary thought, were like him—still lifes of fruit or fish, rendered with painful, photographic exactness, on canvases precisely one foot square. Russell had red hair, which he wore in a thick ponytail, and a beard; he was a large man, with a broad chest and powerful arms, and he reminded Mary of a portrait she had seen of the Viking warrior Leif Eriksson, though the similarity stopped there. Russell’s girlfriend, Laurie, lived in Des Moines, and in the evenings he wrote her long letters in his bedroom, listening to records or the radio, and then at 4:00 A.M. he went to his job at the bakery, making rolls and cakes. He was applying to Ph.D. programs in Renaissance literature, and the plan was that he would go to school somewhere that Laurie, who was a librarian, could also find a job. Unless Russell had just showered, flour could usually be found somewhere on his person—his beard, his shoes—and sometimes he would return from work so caked that he looked like an actor from a Kabuki play.
Mary liked Russell more, and Mary believed he liked her too. But there was Laurie to think of—his devotion to her, and the almost stately happiness this gave him, were the same qualities that both attracted Mary and made anything between them impossible—so it was Curtis she ended up with. This began one warm night at the end of fall, and on Thanksgiving weekend they drove north in Mary’s old Citation to Curtis’s parents’ house in Duluth, a gloomy Tudor on a bluff above the sullen bulk of Lake Superior. Curtis’s father was a judge who liked to hunt, and at Thanksgiving dinner his mother served a goose that he had shot in the wetlands behind the house, while his younger brothers kicked at one another under the table and the wind off the lake rattled the windows of the dining room. Mary and Curtis had been seeing one another just two weeks, and yet they seemed to regard her as a permanent and promising addition to his life. What did she think of Curtis’s paintings? they wanted to know. They were beautiful, yes, but wouldn’t it make more sense for him to pursue something more grounded, such as law or business, while painting as a hobby? And Mary: did she plan to go on working at that bar? What else was in store for a bright young lady like herself? Mary’s family was very quiet—her memories of childhood were like a movie without sound—and by the time the goose was cleared away, she was exhausted and had barely eaten anything. Curtis’s younger brothers fought over who would get to bring her dessert—an enormous tart topped with sail-like wedges of chocolate—and when dinner was over they left the table to play basketball in the driveway while Mary and Curtis took a walk along the bluff in the dwindling light.
“I’m sorry about that,” Curtis said. “I think my parents really like you, though.”
Beneath the pines they stopped to kiss, listening to the thunk of the basketball. Curtis’s face was soft—he had no beard at all—and when he kissed her, Mary often thought of things that seemed arbitrary: the gray undersides of spring rain clouds, a cat licking its paws, sheet music with notations penciled in the margins. This time she thought of a raisin, squashed on the steps of her grandmother’s porch by the weight of a tiny tennis shoe. At just that moment it began to snow.
“Well, here comes the winter,” Mary said. “You know, you should probably tell them not to like me too much.”
On the drive south to Twig they decided to stop at Mary’s parents’ house in a suburb northwest of Minneapolis. In the five years since she had left home for college, her parents had prospered—her father sold advertising for a Christian country-and-western radio station that had gone national, while her mother owned a card and gift shop called Thinking of You—and each time she returned home, Mary was met by the sight of some new major purchase: a pool table, wrought-iron patio furniture, a big-screen television. This unlikely bounty in her parents’ lives was painful to Mary; she was glad they finally had the things they wanted, but it was also true that she had borrowed most of the money to pay for college, and was now facing student loan payments the size of a house mortgage.
No one was home, but a new pop-up camper sat in the driveway, and Mary and Curtis used the crank to open the camper’s compartment and fiddled with the miniature appliances before driving on to Mary’s mother’s store. The store, in a downtrodden shopping center surrounded by aging subdivisions, should not have succeeded, but in fact Mary’s mother, Gretchen, did quite nicely. Early on she had latched on to a new line of china figurines called Cu-tee-pies—dewy-eyed children in occasional costumes, some holding puppies or rabbits or other small animals—and had wangled an exclusive from the distributor, gambling on the chance that they would become collector’s items, which was exactly what had happened. In the window of her shop hung a banner that read YOUR CU-TEE-PIE HEADQUARTERS, and behind the register Gretchen kept a locked case of retired Cu-tee-pies, some selling for as much as a hundred dollars. For graduation she had given Mary a figurine wearing a cap and gown with the words Congratulations Princess! engraved in gold letters on its china base. She suggested that Mary might want to put it somewhere safe, such as a deposit box at the bank, in anticipation of the day when it would be worth a great deal of money: “a great deal,” she said knowingly. But Mary had no place like that, and now it sat on her kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers.
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the small store bustled with holiday shoppers. Mary’s father, Lars, had taken the day off to help and was wrapping Cu-tee-pies in tissue paper at a table set up in the back. Mary and Curtis sat down to help him.
“Mary says you’re a painter,” Lars said to Curtis.
“He’s had a show,” Mary offered.
Lars waved a piece of tape from his fingers. “Is there money in a thing like that?” he asked Curtis.
“There can be,” Curtis sai
d. “But not usually, no.”
Mary’s father shook his head sadly and held up a Cu-tee-pie waiting to be wrapped, a little girl in an elf costume clutching a daisy.
“Guess how much my wife makes on this thing,” Lars said. “Don’t guess, I’ll tell you. Thirty bucks retail, and fifteen of it goes right into the till.”
“Those are excellent margins,” Curtis observed.
“It’s a racket, if you ask me. Listen,” Lars said, and lowered his voice, “I’d like to help out. Let me buy one of your paintings.”
“You really don’t need to do that, Dad,” Mary protested. “You haven’t even seen them. They might not be the sort of thing you like.”
Lars shrugged amiably. “Just pick the one that you think I’d like best.”
“We saw the camper,” Mary said neutrally.
“Oh, that,” Lars said, and cleared his throat. “We got it out of the Pennysaver. Your mother has ideas about going out West. When we’ll have the time I just don’t know.”
Mary’s mother returned with Chinese food from the restaurant next door. Like her husband, Gretchen was very tall, and looked much younger than she actually was. She wore her hair in a long loose ponytail that fell down her back, and this afternoon was dressed in a denim skirt and a sweatshirt embroidered with teddy bears. Mary adored her mother with a hopeless affection, like an unrequited crush. She understood this feeling was common in middle children, as Mary was, but there was also a story. Mary’s mother had spent her first ten years of life in an orphanage in Grand Forks, North Dakota, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Though Gretchen was the first to say that it hadn’t been a bad place at all, the experience of growing up in an institution—of eating, bathing, and sleeping in large groups presided over by kindly old women who meant well but did not always remember her name—had left her with a view of childhood that was sentimental and general. She seemed to draw little distinction between Mary and her older brother and younger sister—often she mistook one for the other, and once had driven Mary to a guitar lesson that was, in fact, her brother Mark’s—and nothing could dissuade her from the opinion that her children, who had clothes to wear, food to eat, and a house to live in, were perfectly contented at all times. As she grew, Mary came to see that her mother was merely replicating the impersonal, well-intentioned affections of the nuns who had raised her. But still she longed for more; she longed to be known.
Gretchen served them noodles in brown sauce on paper plates. “So,” she began cheerfully, “am I to understand you two are no longer roommates?”
“We are roommates,” Mary said.
“A mechanical question,” Gretchen went on. “How do you date someone you live with? I’ve tried to imagine how this works.”
“I just bought one of Curtis’s paintings,” Lars said, changing the subject.
Gretchen looked up, as if the painting were there to see. “Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lars said, and waved his chopsticks around. “It’s a surprise.”
They ate their lunch, then opened their fortune cookies and read them aloud. Mary’s read, simply, “You will come into money,” and in the parking lot, Gretchen gave her a fifty she had taken from the register.
The bill was soft in Mary’s hand. “Doesn’t it confuse the books, just pulling money from the register like that?”
“The books, the books,” Gretchen said wearily. “I am the books.” She hugged Mary close, then Mary and Curtis together. “Be happy together, children.”
By the time they returned to Twig, darkness had fallen, and the sky over the alleyway behind the shoe store was thick with stars. Mary dressed for work in black pants and one of Curtis’s white dress shirts, and put on her heavy coat to walk the three chilly blocks to the Norway. The insides were dim and smoky, and the tables were crowded with students from the college, back from their Thanksgiving holiday and now optimistically drunk. Mary’s favorite customer was a man named Phil, a rail-thin alcoholic with a walrus moustache yellowed from smoking, who got by on small checks from the state. Phil lived in a tiny clapboard house by the grain elevator, and his only companions were his cats, whom he had named after different places in Vietnam: Saigon, Da Nang, Haiphong. Each night, Phil came in and put seven dollars on the bar, and drank till the money was gone: a total of six beers at a dollar a can—Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Grain Belt—and a dollar tip for Mary. This was very little, considering how much time he spent at the bar, but Mary didn’t mind, and if Phil was still sober he sometimes helped her clean up, telling her stories about his cats, or about the war in Southeast Asia, in which he had not fought.
Mary said hello to Phil, took an apron and serving tray from behind the bar, and went to a table of four boys who had just come in.
“Anybody here even close to twenty-one?”
Grumbling, the boys produced a variety of documents. Most had been falsified in one way or another, but the unwritten rule of the Norway was that an honest try got you one drink. Then Mary looked at the last card.
“What’s this?” said Mary. “It’s a library card.”
“The age is right there,” the boy explained.
Some dates had been typed, poorly, on the bottom of the card.
“So it is,” Mary said.
“I’ll have my usual,” the boy said. “A whiskey sour.”
Mary flipped the card onto the table. “Au revoir, mon enfant,” she said. “Begone, junior.”
The boy returned his library card to his wallet. “Fine. Give me a Coke if that’s how you’re going to be.”
“I will if you ask me nicely,” Mary said.
The boy rolled his eyes, and his friends snickered. “Mother, may I have a Coke?”
Mary paused and cocked her hip. “You may,” she said.
Later in the evening, Mary took her coffee break at the bar with Phil, who was just finishing up his fourth Blue Ribbon.
“How’s Curtis?” Phil said. It was Curtis, in fact, who had banned Phil’s cats from the bar. Whenever Phil asked this question, the bitterness of the experience was in his voice.
“Not so bad. He just sold a painting,” Mary said.
Phil shook his head and smoked. “Truthfully, I sometimes wonder if that boy’s good enough for you.”
Mary helped herself to one of his cigarettes. “It’s not like we’re getting married, Phil.”
“I’ll tell you something I heard.” Phil glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper. “You know that college? On the hill? Kids there are so rich they’ll throw away the keys of a brand-new Mercedes. Just pitch them in the trash.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Mary said.
Phil frowned into the broad mirror above the bar. “I watched my buddies die, and for what?”
“I went there, Phil,” she said.
Phil nodded gravely. “So you know,” he said.
In January the temperature fell, as it always did, and the snow piled up in enormous mounds around the town of Twig. Distances seemed to grow longer in the cold, and at night the stars shone hard and pure, like chips of ice, as Mary made her way through the silent streets between her apartment and the Norway. At the end of the month Mary came down with something that felt like the flu; she was tired all the time, and when she wasn’t sick to her stomach, her mouth was filled with the taste of metal. Curtis and Russell took care of her, bringing her glasses of ginger ale in bed, or bowls of heated broth. Mary joked that it was nice to see the two of them getting along, though they did not seem to get, or enjoy, this joke.
Her stomach began to feel better, but the feeling of lassitude did not depart—it seemed to have settled in her bones—and when her period did not come, Mary knew what had happened. The directions on the package said that she should wait until morning to take the test, that the concentration of hormones in her urine would be highest at first waking. But the hours that she kept, working late at the bar and seeing just a few hours of sunlight each day, made this seem li
ke advice for some other woman. She took the test alone in the apartment at two in the afternoon, neither expecting nor receiving a different result than the one she got, then dressed and went to work at the Norway.
She wondered what she would do. She could not say that she loved Curtis, but even if she had, this love would be nothing to trust. In any event, she could not see Curtis as a father. She was afraid, but also felt, strangely, that this fear would guide her, that it would help her choose. In college she had known girls to whom the same thing had happened, and the ones who paid the highest price were those who seemed not to care. They went away for a day or two, an interruption no greater than a trip to the dentist to have wisdom teeth removed—many, in fact, claimed this very alibi—then returned to their lives as if nothing had happened; but a month or so later, just when the crisis seemed over, they would find themselves barricaded in their dorm rooms, unable to sleep or eat or even dress, weeping uncontrollably or else feeling nothing at all. Mary would see one of the resident advisors knocking quietly on the door, and then asking questions—is everything all right with so-and-so?—and the next thing anyone knew, the room would be empty, the mattress turned over and propped against the wall, and that would be the end of it.
On the day after the test Mary awoke in an empty bed, and knew that the worst of the sickness had passed. Curtis had taken the Citation to Minneapolis to show some of his paintings to a dealer who bought artwork for model homes in housing developments, and Mary spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment before visiting Russell at the bakery. The air of the bakery was moist and sweet, and under the long banks of fluorescent lights Russell was moving trays of bread dough, molded into loaves, in and out of the oven. Mary watched him, still in her heavy coat.